Josh Mack blogging at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts, and occasionally on; bicycles, politics, Brooklyn, parenting, crafts, and good reading. Currently helping to build a new NYC neighborhood news site - nearsay.com, that celebrates the voices that make our city. Subscribe to the daily newsletter it gives you what you need to know.

September 27, 2010

Books with overlays are one of my favorite things and Cool Hunting linked to this interesting "book" about cities.

One of the things I hope we see as iPad apps develop, is apps that enable the overlays that used to be in all sorts of books when I was younger. The ability to swipe and go though time on a map, cover a skeleton with muscles, shift a sky around with the zodiac, swipe and get the different characteristics of birds to help narrow down identification are things I look forward to.

September 16, 2010

I got stuck in the storm/tornado in Park Slope, on 9th Street between 4th and 5th Aves. As soon as I crossed 4th Ave heading toward 5th, the rain became torrential and the wind, so intense that that , within seconds, it was a struggle to walk. In fact, there were times when it was almost impossible to walk. It was also hard to see; it was dark and the rain was so heavy. A few times, I had to close my eyes because the wind and rain were so violent. Things were flying overhead. Some giant green thing — I have no idea what it was — flew toward me and I ducked. I coudln’t beleive what was happening. Two people in front of me and I were thrown against a chain link fence near the intersection of 5th Ave and 9th St. We finally got to an ice cream /donut shop at the corner and got inside. It was terrifying. I’ve never been through a storm like that in the city before.

We began the summer a list of technologies, and a few bold claims and the goal to make an intrinsically more private social network. The overwhelming response that we elicited made us realize that technology woudn’t be enough. Even the most powerful, granular set of dropdowns and checkboxes will never give people control over where their content is going, let alone give them ownership of their digital self.

We live our real lives in context, speaking from whatever aspect of ourselves that those around us know. Social tools should work the same way. Getting the source into the hands of developers is our first experiment in making a simple and functional tool for contextual sharing. Diaspora is in its infancy, but our initial ideas are there.

September 15, 2010

As we get older, our senses actually "fuse" together, and we lose the ability to focus on isolated pieces of sensory information. This means adults perceive certain events far more accurately than children can... and vice versa.

Once people reach about the age of twelve, they start to combine sensory information to make better sense of the world. This means adults connect, say, related sights and noises into a single unified perception. In other words, while an adult would perceive a big, barking dog as a single entity, a six-year-old would treat the big dog and the frightening barks as two independent sensory events.

So why are government and media going after craigslist? The same reason, I think, that media and government in, for example, Germany are demonizing Google (even as the German people give Google its biggest market share anywhere in the world). They’re going after the disruptors, the biggest disruptors in sight.

Since craigslist and the internet have existed, newspaper classified revenue has fallen by $13 billion a year, leaving that money in the pockets of former advertiser-customers. Since Google and the internet have existed, many more billions have left traditional media as Google offered their former ad customers a better deal.

September 13, 2010

If you think about all the things people search for on Google, “God” has to be pretty high up there, right? I mean, since the dawn of man, people have been searching for the meaning of life and its creator, so what better way to do that than with a search engine? But divinity apparently has nothing on cheap domain names....

To make Google Instant work, the search giant looks across all queries to find the most popular ones and then predicts what it thinks you’re going to type and auto-populates the results based on that. Clearly, both “Godaddy” and “God of War” are more popular queries on Google — something that is either humorous or sad depending on your level of religiousness.

September 06, 2010

September 03, 2010

Coolhunting has made to two great little videos about the Brimfield Flea Market. The market happens three times a year and takes over the entire town for a 5 days. What I love about the videos are the views of all of the fantastic and focused collections that vendors bring. The last one of 2010 starts is Sept 7-12th so if you haven't got plans maybe these videos will inspire you to take a last-minute roadtrip.

September 01, 2010

The golfer at the Shady Canyon Golf Course in Irvine landed a shot in the rough Saturday. On his next swing, his club snagged a rock, causing a spark that lit the rough ablaze and eventually attracted 150 firefighters to the scene.

Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison design is a perennial metaphor in discussions of digital surveillance and data mining, but it doesn’t really suit an entity like Google. Bentham’s all-seeing eye looks down from a central viewpoint, the gaze of a Victorian warder. In Google, we are at once the surveilled and the individual retinal cells of the surveillant, however many millions of us, constantly if unconsciously participatory. We are part of a post-geographical, post-national super-state, one that handily says no to China. Or yes, depending on profit considerations and strategy. But we do not participate in Google on that level. We’re citizens, but without rights.